I cherish their songs and feel no qualms with calling them "folk songs". They are not traditional, but they are music of the people.

I get a bit peeved with this argument. I revere Dylan - I think he's one of the greatest poets of the 20th century - and I don't doubt that his work would be passed on, from singer to singer and from father to son, if it wasn't possible to listen to recordings. If recording technology were somehow abolished next week, a 22nd-century collector might well pick up local variants of Blowin' in the Wind and Mr Tambourine Man. But we'll never know: Dylan isn't music of the people, Dylan's a recording artist. Traditional and folk-transmitted music survives here and there - football chants, playground rhymes, some hymns and carols - but there's no really music that's of the people in the sense of living and developing among ordinary people in the course of their lives. The ubiquity of broadcast and recorded music changed everything.

That's a real break in the history of music, and a very recent one. Traditional music - folk music, as far as I'm concerned - is all about reaching back before that break and finding out what people used to do for music, before they could all listen to the same thing at the flick of a switch. And if you want to do that and put it in a regular 4:4 with a backbeat, or draft in a jazz bassist, or even throw in a couple of your own, that's fine - as long as you don't lose sight of the fact that the bits that make it folk are the bits that were there before you. We seem to be in a position where the bits that have been added on to folk are seen as compulsory, or at worst as defining what folk is.